American Horror Story: 1984 is a memorable chapter of the anthology series that also doubles as the show’s shortest season yet, with only nine episodes — but why?
American Horror Story has helped cement many of television’s modern horror trends for the past decade. Ryan Murphy’s programs always know how to provoke and excite their audiences, but American Horror Story’s unique approach to storytelling also seriously helped the boom of different anthology series and movies that have followed in its wake. American Horror Story is far from perfect, but it’s still viewed as a leader in the anthology horror sub-genre.
The different seasons of American Horror Story have expertly deconstructed many of horror’s biggest fascinations as well as mashed together many eclectic influences to create unpredictable horror experiments. The seemingly disparate seasons of the anthology horror show even find ways to connect to each other and become a much bigger story. American Horror Story season 9 is a delightful throwback to ‘80s slasher movies, but it also trims the fat and delivers the show’s leanest season yet at only nine episodes.
American Horror Story: 1984 takes place at Camp Redwood, a summer destination that’s been turned into the site of tragedy. 1984 highlights three separate time periods and massacres from Camp Redwood’s history, yet this lengthy timeline is only spread out over nine episodes. American Horror Story often gets lauded for the smart themes of each season and how they start off on the right foot only to resort to messy storytelling and unnecessary padding to stretch the narrative out to the end. American Horror Story’s earliest seasons were routinely 12 episodes, but this number has continued to decrease over the years, with AHS: 1984 being the most drastic example. Sometimes the length of a season can change during production, but AHS: 1984 was always planned to be a shorter length. Considering that the show’s previous season, AHS: Apocalypse, was criticized for dragging on through ten installments, it feels like the reduction in season 9 is Murphy’s response to past feedback.
It’s also significant that Ryan Murphy’s newest TV shows have experimented with shorter seasons. The Politician’s seasons are eight and seven episodes apiece, whereas Hollywood and Murphy’s most recent series, the controversial yet gorgeous Ratched, are seven and eight episodes long, respectively. The most likely factor here is that Murphy has just gotten more comfortable working with a smaller canvas of content, which the consensus seems to think is for the best. Murphy is now more likely to end a season with an atypical amount of episodes, like nine, rather than needlessly tack on more content to reach a conventional production order.
Murphy has dropped veiled hints about American Horror Story’s upcoming season 10, but this hasn’t included the length of the season. It’s possible that COVID complications could result in a shorter than usual season, but production has already been delayed to avoid such problems. American Horror Story season 10 is back on track as of this writing, and if it happens to have nine or even fewer episodes, it will likely be due to creative reasons rather than some greater issue.